Interactive systems connected by wide area networks such as the Internet have steadily evolved into vibrant mediums for information exchange, social interaction and sharing of digital media. Internet users typically maintain one or more accounts with various service providers that feature customizable personal pages, such as personal home pages (e.g., my.yahoo.com, etc.), personal pages on social network sites (e.g., facebook.com, myspace.com, etc.), and the like. To enhance the utility and customization of such pages to end users, service providers sometimes allow users to customize their pages with one or more functional modules or widgets (hereinafter referred to as modules).
In web or Internet environments, these modules can include hypertext markup language (HTML) code and scripts (such as JavaScript, and Asynchronous JavaScript and extensible markup language/extensible stylesheet language (AJAX)) that execute within the context of a client application, such as a browser, to achieve a variety of useful or entertaining functions. For example, modules can be developed to display content, such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts, obtained from Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. Other modules can be developed to display a slideshow of photos hosted on a content aggregation site, such as flickr.com. Other modules can display real-time stock quotes. In many instances, the modules appear in a base HTML document as frames or Inline Frames (iframes), which make it possible to embed another HTML document inside the base HTML document. The service providers maintaining these customizable pages may develop a number of modules from which users may select and add to their pages.